surface handheld “shoot and forget” missiles of undetermined type, most likely twenty-one-pound, night-firing, U.S. Dragon antitank guided missiles with a one-thousand-yard effective range.
Out on the harbor another handheld missile struck only one of the densely packed planes in the forward starboard parking area of the carrier
A motor pool’s cyclone-wire fence at Fort Hood, Texas, was penetrated and twenty-five “Hummers,” or “Humvees”—the army replacements for the old Jeep — were destroyed by fire. It was later discovered that this act of sabotage, however, was sheer vandalism by local teenagers, completely unconnected with the more highly organized and selective attacks launched in other parts of the country by now reactivated “sleepers.”
Five thousand miles away, under cover of the blizzard, Minsky’s six batteries of Siberian BM-21 multiple rocket launchers broke the cease-fire, unleashing their salvos at 1100 hours, delivering 2,160 122mm rockets on a quarter square mile within two and a half minutes — the most intense bombardment by MLRs, or tube artillery, since the Iraqi War.
For the American III Corps stationed at Port Baikal on the forward line of the cease-fire, along the southwestern edge of the lake, it was nothing less than a catastrophic eruption, high V’s of jagged ice blocks, snow, and black frozen earth exploding in their midst. Over 230 were killed outright, hundreds more wounded by the hot, metallic rain of the shrapnel, scores of others concussed by the simultaneous pummeling of air that accompanied the massive rocket offensive. Within the next three minutes, by 1105 hours, the Americans’ 155mm howitzers were returning fire, at least those whose crews had not been taken out by the Siberian MRL attack.
Ground sensors at III Corps HQ indicated Siberian armor moving east rapidly toward them, already deep into the DMZ. Over a hundred American Abrams M1A1 fifty-five-ton main battle tanks moved forward to meet them, another hundred opening fire from their revetment areas behind the frozen lake’s treeline, their 120mm guns in defilade position, though the Siberian tanks’ exact positions could not be ascertained because of the anti-infrared smoke screen created by Minsky’s armored personnel carriers. Forward Siberian observers, however,
The U.S. M1A1s immediately returned fire, but their maximum four-thousand-meter range was of no avail, falling into dead air, the Siberians’ self-propelled 122mms’ thirteen-mile overreach putting Minsky’s batteries well outside harm’s way from the American tanks’ fire.
Apache squadrons now rose en masse from behind the protective barrier of the 3,200-foot Primorskiy mountain range north of Port Baikal, heading low across the Angara River, intent on redressing the imbalance, and on the “hi-pole” Siberian radars the Apache gunships appeared like so many gnats.
“At least sixty,” Minsky’s aide informed him, all heading for the Siberian armor, obviously leaving the less agile and, for the helicopters at least, less dangerous, less mobile, self-propelled Siberian artillery until later, their first priority undoubtedly Minsky’s scores of front-line T-80s.
The fate of the Apaches, however, only confirmed Freeman’s countless warnings to Washington about how the cease-fire would prove to be nothing more than a time for the Siberians to dig in. Minsky’s phalanx of AA guns and missile batteries, dug in and waiting beneath their snow “lizard” pattern camouflage nets, were about to create a bowel-chilling sense of deja vu at American HQ in Khabarovsk, the frantic atmosphere of unrelenting radio traffic filling Freeman’s control center with the nightmarish visions of the Siberians’ deadly feint on the Never-Skovorodino road. There, fake inflatable Siberian tanks, lamps for infrared inside, had suckered Freeman’s gunships into the Siberian-held territory where the Apaches were destroyed in a deadly crossfire of AA guns, missile batteries, and vertical area mines, bloodying Freeman’s Second Army in what was the lowest point in the American pre-cease-fire campaign.
Freeman had been awakened as soon as the attack on Baikal was radioed through, and entering the din of the HQ Quonset at Khabarovsk, he was advised by Dick Norton that in addition to the attack on III Corps at Port Baikal, large formations of Siberian motorized infantry were moving north against III Corps from fifty miles south of Baikal, around Kultuk; and north of Baikal, a second Siberian-armor-led spearhead was materializing, heading south from Maloye Goloustnoye.
A schoolboy could have seen it was a pincer movement, as Freeman had predicted, designed to hit III Corps frontally and from both sides, to encircle the 36,000 men of American HI Corps.
What to do about it, however, given the worsening blizzard conditions, was an entirely different matter. The problems were legion. Despite state-of-the-art Doppler radar, CAS — close air support — Freeman’s immediate and obvious first step, wasn’t possible now in the whiteout conditions. Unless he wanted to risk dozens of collisions between the fighters and the swarms of Apache gunships and other helicopters below, already rushing ammo resupply westward from Kabansk, eighty-five miles northeast of Baikal across the lake.
To add to his worries, Freeman was informed that patrols out of Kultuk near the cliff-top tunnels high above the lake, a small but important railhead held by a company under a Major Truet, were completely cut off from Port Baikal fifty miles to the north.
Freeman would have been even more worried had he known that many of the Siberians’ three thousand attacking tanks were towing
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When the PLA guard came into the cell, he was smiling, telling Alexsandra Malof he had brought her some refreshment:
He knew she wouldn’t think it funny, but he’d underestimated her energy despite having gone thirty-six hours without food or water. Most prisoners were so cowed, they had no strength left for a retort. He certainly wasn’t used to a mere woman prisoner causing trouble, but that’s what he got. With a flick of her wrist, she threw the boiling water into his face, the completely unrelated thought racing across her mind that the Chinese made the best thermoses in the world. The moment he yelled, hands to his face, she kicked him hard in the groin and he collapsed, the submachine gun rattling on the damp flagstone floor. The last time she’d seen a soldier prone was the Siberian who’d raped her in Baikal. She lifted the wooden stool high above her and brought it down on the man’s head, the green cloth of his PLA cap turning dark with blood in the dirty yellow light of the passageway as she frantically pulled the slung AK-47 from his arm. She could hear footsteps — two, perhaps three, guards — coming down the hall toward her cell. She stood back from the door.
There were two of them. The cell exploded in cordite smoke and the ripping tar-paper sound of the AK-47’s burst, both men hit, one already dead on the floor, the other flung back against the corridor wall as if bodily lifted and thrown by some giant hand.
She was running down the grimy corridor, her left hand swishing the hair away from her eyes, right hand gripping the submachine gun, her breath steam as she ran into the colder air bleeding in from the entrance of the jail. As she reached the door, she swung the AK-47 in the direction of the duty guard’s desk, and seeing he wasn’t
